Blog: "Tech feature: Terrain geometry"

[Thomas]

Yeah, the reason for noise is the the packing.

R contains the 8 highest most influential bits in a 24 bit decimal number, G the 8 next and so on.

So when R is not the same as the orginal (as happens in jpeg compression) there are vast changes in the final value, leading to the noise.

I expected this, but was not 100% sure, so figured might as well test